A year ago this Thursday, Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden with poster boards flapping in the wind and declared what he called “Liberation Day.” The hastily assembled charts listed countries, territories, even penguin-inhabited islands. All would face tariffs. Big ones. The justification? A formula the White House released that turned out to be nothing more than raw trade deficit numbers—goods only, no services—plugged in without deep Treasury analysis or coherent economic rationale.
Fast forward twelve months. Inflation is climbing again. The American economy has stalled. Trump’s approval rating sits at thirty-five percent, according to the latest CNN poll. More tellingly, sixty-five percent of surveyed Americans now say his policies are making the economy worse. Even among Republicans, his economic approval has dropped fourteen points since January. For a president who built his brand on business acumen, that’s a devastating erosion.
Yet Trump appears unbothered. As I’ve reported before, he cares less about immediate political consequences and more about how history will remember him. On the anniversary of Liberation Day—April 2—he doubled down, announcing fresh tariffs reaching one hundred percent on name-brand pharmaceuticals, plus adjustments on steel and aluminum. The move triggered panic across global markets, the kind of freefall not seen since the Covid-19 crash in early 2020.
The Dow plummeted 9.48 percent over two days. The S&P 500 dropped ten percent. The Nasdaq fell eleven. Oil, the dollar, even gold—everything tanked. Investors were stunned not just by the scale, but by the lack of sophistication. Trump had been in office barely two months.
Seven days later, he blinked. Hours after posting “Be Cool” on Truth Social and musing about making tariffs permanent, he paused most of them for ninety days. Markets surged. Traders coined a new term: TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out. What followed wasn’t policy. It was a game. Tariffs became a tool for rewarding friends with gold bars and expensive planes, punishing perceived slights, manipulating markets. Well-connected insiders started making fortunes on what can only be described as insider knowledge, including around the U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran. Nothing has been done about it.
The broader economic impact has been stark. Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist, called it the “Trump freeze.” Hiring stalled as businesses couldn’t predict what the president might announce day to day. The labor market, hot in 2023 and 2024 under Biden, seized up almost overnight. We now have what economists call a K-shaped economy: the wealthy get richer while middle-class and working families spiral downward.
Trump’s military adventurism—strikes in Venezuela and Iran, threats against Cuba and Mexico—has only deepened the instability. Gas prices are rising again. Recession, stagflation, worse—all are on the table now. The manufacturing boom Trump promised hasn’t materialized. Despite his inflated claims about foreign investment flooding in, official government data from the Commerce Department shows foreign direct investment last year totaled $288 billion. That’s slightly less than the year before and below the ten-year average, according to NPR.
Inflation, which had declined sharply under Joe Biden—though not enough to save Kamala Harris in 2024—is now higher than the day Biden left office. With energy costs spiking due to the Iran conflict, it will almost certainly climb further. And here’s the kicker: NPR reported that Americans actually imported slightly more goods in 2025 than in the previous year, before tariffs took effect. Businesses stockpiled when they could, exploited temporary reductions, and ultimately imported more. The policy achieved the opposite of its stated goal.
I spoke with a trade economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who put it bluntly: “This isn’t trade policy. It’s performance art with real consequences.” She pointed out that the so-called reciprocal tariff formula ignored services trade entirely, an area where the U.S. leads globally. Financial services, technology licensing, consulting—none of it factored in. The White House simply cherry-picked numbers that fit a narrative.
In February, the Supreme Court struck down many of the tariffs as unconstitutional in a six-to-three ruling. Trump called it a “disgrace,” accused the Court of being “swayed by foreign interests,” and lashed out at his own appointees, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. He vowed to impose ten and fifteen percent tariffs on every country regardless, and has refused to refund money American companies paid under the now-unconstitutional scheme. That’s being litigated now too.
Trump’s understanding of trade has never evolved. He equates trade deficits with budget deficits. He believes if a country exports cars to the U.S., they should import the same number of American cars or face penalties. It’s a view he’s held for over forty years, impervious to evidence or expert counsel. During my time covering his first administration, sources inside the National Economic Council told me they’d given up trying to explain comparative advantage or supply chain complexity. He simply didn’t care.
The human cost is harder to quantify but no less real. I recently returned from Ohio, where a small manufacturer of industrial components told me his costs had jumped thirty percent due to steel tariffs. He’s laid off twelve workers. A pharmaceutical distributor in Arizona said name-brand drug tariffs would force her to raise prices or close. These aren’t abstractions. They’re livelihoods, families, communities.
We’ve overused the term “Katrina moment” to describe presidential failures. But here it fits. Trump had one during his first term with the pandemic response. Now he’s created another—this time self-inflicted. An ailing economy, domestic unrest, a widening war in the Middle East. All of it stems from decisions made in service of a legacy he imagines but hasn’t earned.
The markets will continue their volatile dance. Traders will keep gaming the TACO cycle. The wealthy will profit. Everyone else will pay more for groceries, gas, medicine. A year after Liberation Day, Americans are less free economically than they were before. The tariffs haven’t brought back manufacturing jobs or balanced trade. They’ve delivered chaos, constitutional crisis, and a deepening divide between those who can weather instability and those who cannot.
Trump stood in that Rose Garden a year ago with his poster boards and his promises. The wind whipped his hair. The cameras rolled. He declared victory before the battle even started. Now the casualties are piling up, and he’s moved on to the next spectacle, indifferent to the wreckage left behind.
